Studies Currently in Progress

Here are some of the questions we are exploring in our current research at the Center for Infant Studies. If you would like to participate in one of these studies with your child, we are happy to give you more information.

• The TOTLOT study - Talking Over Time, Listening Over Time
Is language comprehension related to language production in 18- to 36-month-old children?

In this *long term* study, we are following the same group of children for 18 months in order to track how children's skill in speech comprehension is related to each child's developing expressive vocabulary. In this study we are using a combination of measures including a test of children's rapid interpretation of words in our looking-while-listening procedure and parents' reports of vocabulary growth every 3-6 months. As children get older and they are saying more and more, they are tested on more complex and variable sentences. This allows us to explore whether children who are fast and accurate in interpreting speech are also advanced in their speech production and their ability to integrate multiple words.

• Are young children able to efficiently search for named objects in a visual display? 

Adults make sense of speech as quickly as each word is heard, and when looking at complex scenes adults look to what is mentioned as quickly as they hear it named. What about children? To find out, we are observing 2-year-olds in a new version of our looking-while-listening procedure and in interactive tasks in order to find out how speech processing works together with visual searching. Are young language learners able to combine their comprehension skill with their memory for object locations in order to rapidly search a scene for what is being labeled?

• How are 2- to 3-year-old children developing in their understanding of descriptive words?

Descriptive words like color and size terms can be difficult for young children to learn, and to combine with the nouns that they describe. We are currently investigating how the same children develop from 2- to 3-years old in their ability to rapidly understand familiar adjectives like "big" and "blue" by using our looking-while-listening procedure in combination with two interactive tasks. As children mature during this year and become better able to interpret adjectives more quickly and accurately, they may also improve in how easily they can learn new descriptive words, and how well they can remember adjective-noun combinations.

• Do infants growing up hearing different languages learn to listen to speech in different ways?

Listeners of different languages have experience with different kinds of linguistic cues in the speech that they hear. English-learning children, for example, hear the all-purpose article the before nouns in both singular and plural forms, while Spanish-learning children hear four different versions of the comparable article (la, el, las, or los), depending on whether the noun is feminine or masculine, singular or plural. Using the looking-while-listening procedure, we are finding out whether Spanish-learning infants take advantage of these distinctions that are unavailable in English to predict what kind of word is coming next.

• Does redundancy help young children with sentence comprehension?

When talking to children, adults often repeat words or even whole utterances- a charactersitc of speech to children that has been found in many different languages. Adults often also use a very limited set of sentences over and over. For example, "Where's the ___?" or "Show me the ___" are typically combined with different object names. Does this kind of repetition help children more easily interpret what they hear? In order to address this question we are testing children of different ages in our looking-while-listening procedure, using utterances in which children hear familiar object names in the same sentence frame throughout the task, and utterances in which the sentence frames vary across utterances. Younger children may benefit from the redundancy of frames, while older children may be able to cope with more variability.

• Can children learn new words by exclusion?

Learning the meaning of a new word can be a challenging task for a very young child. One theory of word-learning proposes that as a useful strategy for learning new words, children develop an assumption that every object has only one name. Then, if a child is looking at two things, one of which she already has a name for then she will learn that a new word applies to the object that doesn't already have a name. Using our looking-while-listening procedure are investigating whether children are using such an exclusionary learning strategy. We show them pairs of pictures--one familiar object (e.g. a car) and one novel object, and ask them to "Look at the deebo" in order to find out at what age children will look to the novel object as a match for the novel word.